Computer systems and many other electronics systems often store data in a parallel format. The stored data is communicated to other portions within the system with a parallel bus architecture, where each data bit is communicated over a separate communication bus wire. Modern electronics device interfaces have begun to adopt serial communication interfaces as a way of simplifying the interface. Example electronics interfaces that use serial communication topologies include the Universal Serial Bus (USB) Interface, IEEE 1394 “Firewire” Interface, to name a few.
A data serializer is a device that receives parallel data and converts the parallel data into a serial data stream. Data serializers are useful in many devices such as interfacing a USB device to a computer system, where the computer system has a parallel data bus and the USB device communicates with serial data. A wide variety of applications exist for data serializers such as telecommunications, data communications, backplane/cable interconnect applications, and video interface applications, to name a few. Interface circuits are also becoming available for bi-directional communications that includes both serializing and de-serializing functions.